Afghanistan diggers honoured at dawn services

The rawest grief on Wednesday’s 97th Anzac Day belonged in Townsville, home to three Diggers whose recent sacrifice in Afghanistan carried forward the Anzac tradition forged in Turkey in 1915.

“Young men who last year may have well stood next to you at this gathering, or played a game of two-up with you, have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation," Brigadier Shane Caughey told a remembrance service.

He asked the crowd to remember the most recently fallen of 32 Australians to die in Afghanistan in the past decade.

Private Matthew Lambert, 26, was killed by a roadside bomb last August.

In Melbourne, Afghanistan veteran Colonel Jason Blain told the dawn service it was important to remember the new Anzacs who were prepared to follow in the steps of those at Gallipoli and make the ultimate sacrifice.

Governor-General
Quentin Bryce
made a surprise visit to troops serving in Afghanistan before flying to Gallipoli to join Prime Minister
Julia Gillard
and thousands of other Australians at Anzac Cove.

Defence Minister
Stephen Smith
, visiting Papua New Guinea in the 70th anniversary year of the Japanese invasion, also paid tribute to the 32 fallen Diggers in Afghanistan.

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“Like the Anzacs and the men who served in Papua and New Guinea during World War II, these 32 took on tough, dangerous and vital work away from home."

Some of the biggest crowds ever gathered to commemorate Anzac Day yesterday in Canberra where 25,000 people, many young, braced sub-zero temperature outside the Australian War Memorial to attend the dawn service.

Later, after the sun peeped out but winds were still cold, a crowd of 15,000 – young families and older people – watched a veterans’ march led by a riderless horse in memory of fallen soldiers.

Three F/A-18 Hornets flew across Lake Burley Griffin up Anzac Parade. Organisers said the dawn service was around 5000 larger than the previous year, with crowds expected to grow each year until the centenary, in three years’ time, of the day Australian and New Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli in 1915.

In Sydney, former defence force chief
Peter Cosgrove
described the turnout as magnificent and said crowds had “really saluted the spirit of Anzac".